


Risky Business

by DiamantineMind



Series: Thawing [3]
Category: Black Widow (Comics), Marvel (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: 1960s, AU, Arc Reactor, Black Widow Ops Program, Cold War, Department X, Elias is the Son of Emma Frost, Frost International, Gen, Hellfire Club, History, JFK was a mutant, Major Original Character(s), Mutant Powers, Mutant Rights, Mutants, New York City, Past Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Red Room (Marvel), Roxxon Oil Corporation, SHIELD, Shaw Industries, Shaw is Creepy, Spies & Secret Agents, Stark Industries, Super Soldier Serum, The Tesseract (Marvel), Undercover Natasha Romanov, the Howling Commandos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-18 11:23:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14851823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiamantineMind/pseuds/DiamantineMind
Summary: The Frosts practice risky corporate strategies while visiting an old wartime ally and business rival at his secret research facility in Flushing, Queens. Several days later, Emma and Elias decide to insure a potentially auspicious business asset as they inspect the aftermath of Natalia's visit to the great city of New York.





	Risky Business

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing except for the original characters which appear here. All rights belong to Marvel Comics.

# NEW YORK CITY, USA  
THE STARK INDUSTRIES MUNITIONS PLANT IN FLUSHING, QUEENS  
MARCH 1965

“I wonder what the homeowners insurance rates are like in the area?” Elias mused aloud to his mother as he drove his white Ferrari 275 GTS convertible northbound down Whitestone Expressway.

He glanced to where Emma sat in the leather passenger seat of his roadster. Her long ash blonde hair was piled atop the back of her head by a handful of hairpins and sheer willpower, and it was tucked behind a satiny white polka dotted headscarf that was baby blue on one side and canary yellow on the reverse. The sunlight glared off the reflective lenses of her 18 karat gold-plated Cartier sunglasses, danced down the sleek powder blue leather of her Tibetan lamb fur-trimmed coat, and reflected off her high-waisted dove-white palazzo pants. She idly thrummed her French manicured fingernails on the door panel as the clement mid-March breeze gently tugged at the fur of her coat and the ends of her hair.

“This munitions plant of Howard’s has not been officially operative since October of 1945, so I cannot believe it would be as exorbitant as you imagine it being,” she said as Elias steered onto Exit 14 and coasted along the off-ramp. Emma cast her attention down to Flushing Creek below them as they crossed it. “I remember when this place used to be beautiful. Marshes, water fit for swimming, greenery as far as the eye could see.”

“I only ever remember this part of New York, borrowing the language of Fitzgerald—damn the oleaginous toad and his puerile, psychologically vacant writing—being but a great valley of ashes,” Elias recalled, his pale eyes flickering along the industrial landscape. “I can still taste the bitterness of char on my tongue from when we used to go this way to visit clients and investors in Port Washington.”

“I should have had you a century sooner so that you could have seen this place before humanity ruined it, darling,” Emma sighed wistfully as she turned her focus back to the road upon the off-ramp’s termination on the other side of Flushing Creek. Elias merged onto a road that he drove along until he came to the turn lane for Linden Place. When the traffic light changed to green, he made a right onto Linden. “Did I ever tell you that, after we read it, I burned the signed copy of _The Great Gatsby_ that Fitzgerald gave us?”

“What?” Elias snorted in delight, his gaze skimming over a bowling alley, an endless stream of brownstone apartments, a hotel painted one shade darker than his convertible, and aging townhouses as they traversed Linden Place. “Mother, you didn’t!”

“I did,” Emma grinned. Elias’s shoulders shook with laughter as he turned onto 32nd Avenue. “I packaged the ashes and had them shipped to his doorstep.”

Lined with rundown graffiti-littered red brick warehouses, grease-smudged automobile shops, and dirt-stained brownstone apartments, 32nd Avenue stretched on for several blocks before it culminated in the bustling intersection of 32nd and College Point Boulevard. Beyond the intersection lay a long strip of land along the eastern bank of Flushing Creek where the Queens-based Stark Industries munitions plant loomed like the carcass of an aged grey beast. 

“Well,” Elias said after a beat of driving in silence. “That explains it.”

“Explains what, darling?”

“Why I could never find that bloody book when I tried to burn it myself.”

The sound of Emma’s laughter, so very much like the musical sound of frozen rain tapping on a windowpane or like the crystals of a ballroom chandelier tinkling above a grand ballroom, bubbled from her throat to rest upon her son’s ears. With a wry grin, Elias came to a stop at the intersection at the end of 32nd Avenue and flicked on his blinker. As he waited for the traffic light to change in his favor, Elias and Emma observed through a steady stream of traffic the seemingly abandoned Stark Industries plant where Howard’s people made munition, missiles, and napalm for the U.S. government during the Second World War. Unknown to virtually everyone, though, was the fact that life still teemed within what externally seemed but a carapace of a place that had seen far better days. Hell, Elias and his mother had only uncovered the hidden purpose of this low profile location of Howard’s through some good-natured corporate espionage.

“Can you feel the guards?” Emma leaned forward in her seat, tipping her sunglasses low and casting her icy eyes along the bank.

A long compound of connected buildings encircled in barbed wire and chain link fencing, the Stark Industries munitions plant stretched from 32nd Avenue to 34th Avenue under the shadow of Whitestone Expressway and alongside the brackish waters of Flushing Creek. Despite it being widely believed to have been left unused since the end of the war, as a neighbor, Elias personally felt that nothing would delight him more than to look out his window every morning as he listened to _Don McNeill’s Breakfast Club_ on the radio and know that he was only a single deviant spark away from a conflagration of God knows what kind of explosive that could still be lying around in Howard’s old plant that would force all of Flushing to be evacuated and consequently send everyone’s property values plummeting.

Regardless, neither Elias nor his mother had to rely on their telepathic talents to grasp that if there was ever a reason for America’s middle-aged and infamously overt Mustachioed Casanova to operate with what scant subtlety he possessed and work out of what appeared for all intents and purposes to be a deserted factory instead of one of his more highbrow and cutting-edge locales around the world, it must have been a good one. Naturally, Elias and Emma could already confirm that what Howard was hiding behind the thick concrete walls of his plant did indeed necessitate a certain degree of… well, subtlety, especially considering the oft apocalyptic tensions between the United States and the U.S.S.R. that had only been exacerbated since Elias and his mother (and the rest of the Western World for that matter) had lost Kennedy to an assassin in Texas a year and four months ago. The last thing Howard would want the public hearing was that he had been working alongside a Soviet, let alone an authority on electromagnetism and fusion reaction that was formerly on the KGB’s payroll, since 1946.

“I can sense the guards,” Elias nodded as the light turned green and he made a left onto College Point Boulevard. “Twenty-five professionals hired from a private military company as well as a team of Stark Industries scientists.” Elias drifted into the lane closest to the razor-edged enclosure surrounding the munitions plant and eyed the locked gateway up ahead on the side of the road. “I do wonder why Howard chose to hire PMCs to serve as guards instead of capitalizing on his position as one of the directors of S.H.I.E.L.D. to staff this facility.”

“You can ask him soon enough, darling; he’s working alongside his boffins and the Soviet as we speak.”

“Splendid,” Elias’s irises silvered as they remained trained on the road before him.

He reached out with his mind and caressed the fragile psyches of every single one of Howard’s PMCs, his influence casting far and wide throughout the plant and shimmering in the atmosphere over the factory like a great steely net before ensnaring the pliant minds of the hired guards in his telepathic grasp. Twenty-five budlike brains burst into open-petaled blossoms for Elias, proffering to him all their knowledge and skills and secrets for his use. Twenty-five sets of eyes extended Elias’s sight to all reaches of the building, no dark corner left unseen, no act left unwitnessed. From the former warehouse-turned-state-of-the-art security and surveillance station to the long production lines remodeled into a number of high-tech laboratories, Elias saw it all. With hardly half a thought, he compelled two PMCs posted in the security and surveillance station to begin redirecting the incriminating gaze of any security camera onsite that even held a fraction of a chance of capturing Elias and his mother on film, and he urged another pair of guards to rush to the gate. 

“Such a peculiar place for a weapons factory,” Elias said as he pulled off College Point Boulevard and drove up to the gateway just as the guards were so generously slipping loose the final lock and pushing the gate open. When Howard’s two PMCs were safely out of the way, Elias eased his Ferrari forward into the compound and parked it at one of the loading bays. “I suppose we cannot judge Howard too harshly, though; we do have that one electronics factory in the urban heart of Tehran.”

“Oh,” Emma sighed longingly while she slipped off her designer sunglasses and set them on the dash. “I miss Iran, darling—the cuisine is scrumptious.”

“Now that you mention it, Mother, I could go for some of the stew we had last time; you know, the one with poultry and pomegranate syrup that was served with white rice. Khoresh-e fesenjān?” A pair of guards jogged to Elias’s roadster, Heckler & Koch handguns holstered at their hips, and opened the driver’s and passenger’s side doors with all the grace of well-trained valets. Elias slid out his car, tossed his keys to the guard nearest him, and patted him on the chest. “Be a dear and make sure my baby does not get hurt while we are gone, sweetheart; I just waxed and detailed him all by hand this morning, and I swear that if someone so much as puts their oily finger on him, I will damn well but a bloody dent in them and you.”

“You and your cars,” Emma snorted at her son as the second guard offered her his hand. She took his help graciously and rose to her feet before eying the vacant loading dock. “I’ll give Howard this much: he’s committed to the act of making this facility appear too ignoble for use by one of America’s most illustrious billionaires since the likes of Rockefeller, Carnegie, or us.”

Elias’s mother was far from wrong. The concrete loading bay which had once been a continuous sheet of smooth grey was pocked with potholes and had been reduced to cracked rubble in spots, allowing weeds to grow up from the earth and color the dreary ground. Faded newspaper shreds were caught in the links of the fencing and waved like banners in the breeze, empty aluminum beer cans dotted the lot outside the munitions plant like curious metallic flowers, and shards of glass lay hidden in the dirt like jewels waiting to be polished. The metal loading dock doors were streaked with rust and decorated with the most sophisticated of urban artworks. Though he was being unfairly sarcastic, some of the graffiti actually impressed Elias, such as the hyperrealistic rendition of Rosa Parks and Dr. King standing hand-in-hand or the art-nouveau depiction of Erik Lehnsherr’s helmeted profile in shades of oxblood and aubergine with the phrase “No more hiding, no more suffering” arcing around the crown of his anti-telepathy headgear. Elias shook his head. To a degree, Erik was right, and Charles was no different, and yet… their philosophies were two vastly disparate kinds of extremism.

Turning away from the graffiti and walking to his mother, Elias nodded at a nondescript side door: “According to Howard’s watchdogs, that is one of the two entrances to the renovated laboratories. There is another around back. Both are heavily fortified, but I have guards ready to let us in on my command.”

Emma looped her arm through her son’s: “Shall we?”

With the minds of Howard’s PMCs at their disposal, Elias and his mother made quick work of navigating the plant, which was as slovenly and slipshod on the inside as it was on the outside for much of their trek through the mechanized wasteland that was the vast majority of Howard’s secret facility. Just when Elias had been beginning to feel like he was going to need at least three separate highly thorough showers to disinfect himself of the dirt and dust, he and Emma stumbled upon the portion of the plant which had been remodeled for scientific study. Hidden behind a set of biometrically locked blast-proof doors, stepping into Howard’s laboratories was like stepping into a different plane of reality where grey grittiness and squalor were but distant dreams of an epoch long lost to the sands of time. Elias actually had to squint against the fluorescent lighting reflecting off the blinding sterility and brilliant whiteness of the renovated assembly line-turned-research center.

“Bloody hell,” he cursed under his breath, uncertain himself of whether he was more stunned by the drastic change of scenery or the glaring lights.

Blinking as his eyes adjusted, Elias quickly scanned the former factory floor while his mother telepathically cloaked them from mortal sight, molding the multicolored psionic energy in the room into a frigid white dome of power that swirled and glittered about herself and her son like a localized snowstorm. Austere walls marked with windows of reinforced glass, diagram- and equation-littered chalkboards, and machinery of the highest caliber—well, in the United States and not owned by Frost International, anyway; Elias had seen better in some of his and his mother’s own facilities and in Wakanda, but that was another story. Men in lab coats buzzed and droned about like studious bees across the room, arguing and hypothesizing and collaborating. Some pointed fervently at schematics sketched upon the chalkboards. Elias followed their gaze to see repeated figures appearing at least once on each chalkboard in the room: an all too familiar crystalline, cube-shaped vessel of unimaginable power and limitless energy and some manner of largescale toric…thingamabob?

 _“Do you see this?”_ Elias telepathically queried his mother as he walked past several of Howard’s scientists to inspect an unmanned chalkboard. _“These equations? The schematics? Howard’s finally using his research on the Tesseract.”_

 _“A few of the finer details regarding the physics are off,”_ Emma paced after her son and narrowed her sapphire eyes in scrutiny at the chalkboard. _“Are these people not supposed to be the best scientific minds Howard has to work with?”_

 _“Well, yes,”_ Elias conceded. _“But that wasn’t my point, Mum. This torus-shaped device, is this supposed to be a...”_ He examined the equations and chemical reactions plotted about the diagram, his mind processing the data far faster than any of Howard’s supercomputers. _“God in Heaven, it’s a prototypical energy source based off the Tesseract.”_

 _“Well, Howard did drunkenly confess at the international Hellfire Club soiree of 1953 in Los Angeles that he believed the Tesseract could be the key to indefinite sustainable energy,”_ Emma reminisced as she smudged out an incorrect coefficient, picked up a nearby piece of chalk, and corrected the error. _“But this blueprint doesn’t make sense to me; if the core truly burns isotopes of palladium like it says, then he’s making a cold fusion reactor of some sort, one that depends upon a palladium-103 and palladium-107 radio-isotopic decay cell to produce an electrical current.”_ Emma traced the stream of chemical equations with the piece of chalk pinched between her fingers, and Elias did the same with his eyes. _“But how is Howard reconciling the balancing of the protons between the isotopes? Palladium-107 releases an electron via beta decay when it turns into silver-107, therein causing a neutron to turn into a proton.”_

 _“And palladium-103 produces rhodium-103 via electron capture, taking an inner electron into the nucleus, combining it with a proton, and creating a neutron,”_ Elias nodded eagerly, pointing to the reaction in question on the board. _“The electrons would balance the resulting atomic nuclei. If he’s aiming to create energy, there would, in effect, be no net flow of electricity, which means—”_

_“Howard has found a way to utilize the beta decay of palladium-107 ions as an electron source for palladium-103—”_

_“Thereby producing an electric circuit between two different radioactive isotopes!”_ Elias pointed to the diagram of the torus-shaped reactor, taking note of the band-like segments sketched intermittently along the ring of the apparatus. _“He must be using electromagnets in the actual reactor, then, to ionize, control the electron transfer, and manipulate the radioactive decay of the palladium-103.”_

 _“I must admit that it’s an ingenious attempt to replicate the Tesseract without causing the kind of destruction that the Tesseract itself is capable of wreaking,”_ Emma canted her head in acknowledgement and set the chalk down after correcting another numerical error. _“The use of palladium, of course, as Howard likely knows, is dreadfully subpar and causing most of the complications he’s running into. He may be limited by the technology of his time, but vibranium would do wonders had he the resources, although I suspect from this data that he has already crossed that bridge and considered it a fruitless path to follow. The poor man likely still thinks that he used the last of this world’s vibranium cache to build Captain Rogers’s shield.”_

Turning his searching gaze to the laboratories once more, Elias spotted Howard across the room. Elias himself vaguely recalled being 47—the year was 1891, Benjamin Harrison was the President, the Gay Nineties were treating Frost International rather well, and the suffrage movement was picking up speed around the world—but unlike Howard, Elias’s 47 years had not looked so… timeworn. The nearly ebony hair on which Howard had prided himself in his youth had faded in color, having greyed at the temples, and had receded back from his creased forehead. Small lines likewise furrowed the once tight flesh at the corners of his eyes and mouth, and his tanned skin was beginning to show the telltale signs of a man who had spent his lengthy bachelor years lazing in the sun with a drink in hand and women queued up for his affections when he wasn’t tinkering in some lab or fleeing the United States on charges of selling weapons to Russians.

Some things had and would forever remain the same, however. He was still trim, wore his signature mustache, and refused to don a lab coat in his own facilities where he demanded everyone else be dressed to strict protocol. Despite his wife’s laboring to make an honest man of him, Howard Stark’s psyche also still reeked of lifelong duplicity and self-interest behind the showman-playboy persona he wore like a second skin and clung to like a lifeline.

Alas, the prices one must pay to climb the menacing American ladder as the son of immigrants, the son of Jews, in an increasingly xenophobic and intolerant country. Though Howard may not have been one of Elias’s favorite wartime allies or business rivals or people in general, he admired the man’s will to claw his way out of the oppression and baseness of his childhood and clamber to the acme of American society. For someone whose father had been a fruit vendor and whose mother had made shirtwaists in a factory, Howard had risen from rags to riches, a regular American Cinderella sans bespoke crystal footwear. 

_“Do we feel like extending an olive branch before we neglect to tell Howard that Natalia is on her way with another K.G.B. agent to snatch his ex-Soviet colleague?”_ Elias asked his mother.

 _“Personally?”_ Emma turned on her heel, wound her arm through her son’s again, and walked them back to the center of the room. _“No. Do you feel the need to do so?”_

 _“I’m indifferent.”_ Elias admitted, his eyes trained on the future abductee, a pale and dark-haired giant of a man _—Anton Vanko, mid-forties, defected from the U.S.S.R. at the end of World War II and sought asylum in the United States thereafter—_ as he conversed with Howard. _“Vanko is…”_ Elias narrowed his eyes and honed in on Vanko’s mind; the Russian was hiding something, something which had been weighing upon his psyche for years— _“Vanko is—no, was a spy. He just went rogue on the U.S.S.R. a week ago.”_

_“That certainly explains why my better judgment barred me from trying to steal him from Stark Industries and employ him as a lead scientist at one of our labs the second he stepped foot on American soil.”_

Elias nodded slowly: _“That also explains why the K.G.B. is sending Natalia and another agent to abduct him, then; his original defection had been a ploy, but this time it was too authentic for their liking.”_

 _“Fickle as cats, the K.G.B.,”_ Emma snorted, and with a dismissive flick of her wrist, the swirling psionic energy shrouding them from detection dissipated into the rafters high overhead. 

As per custom to those who are unused to the tricks of telepaths or the talents of superpowered individuals in general, the sudden appearance of two natty blonds from seeming nothingness not only caught the attention of every single person in the room but also gave them each quite a start. One man flinched so hard that he tripped over his own feet and nearly fell upon a rather fragile and highly expensive apparatus beside him. A thunderous silence descended upon the factory floor for several fleeting moments as all eyes then turned from Elias and Emma to Howard, whose composure had slipped seconds prior and whose visage revealed an array of rapidly shifting emotions: astonishment melted into fury which chilled into leaden recognition that in turn grew buoyant and became a sort of curiosity tinged with tones of uneasy caution and an almost fond exasperation.

“How—?” Howard began, shattering the tense quiet.

"Your security team are gentlemen, Howard,” Emma offered the man a charming smile and little else. “They were only too happy to open any door we wanted.”

“They’re also getting fired,” Howard muttered before jamming his hands in his pockets and striding toward Elias and Emma. His scientists scrambled to return to their studies as he walked by. Vanko’s gaze lingered on the Frosts until Elias caught his eye and the alleged ex-Soviet turned his back to the unfolding scene in the center of the old assembly line. “This is private property, you know. It’s also a top-secret facility that I’ve gone to great lengths to secrete.”

“Truly?” Elias shifted his attention from Vanko to Howard, whose nostrils marginally flared as he came to a stop before the Frosts. “We had no idea, sweetheart, I assure you.”

“Glad to see you’ve still got your scintillating wit and suavity,” Howard sighed heavily through his nose. “Since I assume you have my security team firmly under your thumbs, there’s no point in throwing you both out, so how can I help you?”

“Oh, Howard, darling,” Emma unlinked her arm from her son’s and patted Howard’s cheek, “as if you could even think of tossing your two dearest corporate competitors and most valued S.H.I.E.L.D. consultants aside like they were nothing more to you than trifles.” A single fluting chuckle escaped her, and she shook her head, patting Howard’s cheek more sharply this time, the smack and suction of flesh audible with each strike. “Now, my dear, let us get down to the brass tacks; we have simply missed you and the wonderful brain housed in that skullcap of yours so dearly that we came on a social call. Indulge a pair of old friends, won’t you, Howard?”

“The day that Emma and Elias Frost swing by unannounced for a ‘social call’ without a hidden agenda or twenty is the day that I drop dead,” Howard snorted, shaking his head in amusement as Emma’s hand fell back to her side. “Why the hell not, though, I guess? We can gab—it’s bound to be more interesting than anything else I had planned for the day.”

* * *

“The bar is serving scotch on the rocks today, ladies and gents,” Howard cast a glance over his shoulder as he poured his drink into a crystal tumbler filled with ice chips. “Any takers?”

Elias examined the renovated foreman’s breakroom that Howard had made his personal office and all its ascetic décor: “More of a martini man, admittedly.”

“I too appreciate the offer, Howard dear, but I don’t drink _that_ scotch,” Emma said as she idly inspected Howard’s cluttered desk before taking a seat in one of the man’s high-back leather chairs, conceivably the most extravagant furnishing in the room. Crossing one leg neatly over the other, she turned her wintery eyes then to Howard’s back. 

“I think I recall you saying something like that at my first Hellfire Club party,” Howard hummed in thought as he capped his scotch decanter and set it aside on the bar behind his desk. He turned to face the Frosts as Elias moved to stand beside his mother, shifting his weight so that he leaned casually against the back of her chair. “Boston, spring of 1941, the New England branch’s annual gala. Sir John Braddock, Warren Worthington II, Sebastian Shaw, and I were there to be inducted. I was in the midst of speaking with a friend—”

“Hugh Jones, the head of Roxxon Oil Corporation and the man who you would later make a cuckold, you mean,” Elias reminded with a smirk. Without so much as a look in his mother’s direction, he accessed the psychic link between them and telepathically queried, _“Are you ready?”_

_“I’m entering Vanko’s subconscious as we speak, darling.”_

“Yes,” Howard cleared his throat, “thank you for jogging my memory, Frost.” Flicking his brown eyes between Elias and Emma, he continued: “And then all of a sudden, the real celebrities of the party show up—Club Royalty! Let’s see, Ned Buckman was the Black King at the time, and he introduced himself alongside you two and a pretty blonde piece of arm candy, his Black Queen. Paris Seville, I believe—”

“And then you revealed yourself to be highly intoxicated and a spoiled lothario riding into the Hellfire Club on a tide of entitlement if memory serves me correctly,” Emma smiled affably. Her glacial blue irises froze into a tundra white color defined from the off-white sclera of her eyes by a wire-thin ring of silver-cyan, and she telepathically said to her son, _“The replication of Vanko’s knowledge on electromagnetism and fusion reaction has commenced.”_

“Ah, yes, well…” Howard frowned, none the wiser to his sudden development of a case of something akin to acute induced visual agnosia thanks to Elias. With his parietal lobes temporarily impaired in such a way, Howard may have been able to see the piercing eyes of the two blonds visiting him, but he was ignorant to the fact that those eyes he beheld were no longer the jewel blue he was accustomed to observing; rather, they were psychically charged and colored in shades of white and silver. “Those were quite the days, weren’t they?” He took a long sip of his scotch and said, “Thank God people change.”

“People do change…” Emma said with a sigh, thrumming her manicured nails on the plush armrests of Howard’s chair in displeasure. Elias felt his mother sneer psychically before she said to him, _“So, not only is Vanko an ex-spy, but he is also riding off of Howard’s coattails. For a so-called fusion reaction and electromagnetism genius, he certainly does not know much more than you or I, darling.”_

 _“Does that then make us among the world’s foremost experts on fusion reaction and electromagnetism?”_ Elias asked his mother with a playful lilt. _“I think it should.”_

Emma offered her son a fond smirk before turning her attention back to Howard: “Despite the perhaps unwarranted verbal lashings, Howard, it is good to see you.” 

“Yes,” Elias nodded his agreement even though it was not entirely the truth. Like Howard had earlier stated, the Frosts had possessed ulterior motives for their visit today prior to finding out Vanko was a largely hopeless resource for further scientific insights. Perhaps, though, he could still be of use; corporate intel and Stark secrets were just as desirable as knowledge of advanced physics and chemistry, after all. Of course, Elias and his mother could have mined it all direct from the source himself, but psionically parasitizing people who could be considered friends mayhap crossed the already tenuous and hazy ethical line all psychics perpetually toed due to the nature of their burdensome gift. “We missed you at the last three Hellfire Club annual galas.”

“Emma, Elias,” Howard’s eyes flickered to the drink in his hand, the ice clinking softly in his glass. “You know as well as I do that I’m trying to put my days of debauchery behind me. I’m not quite as young—or romantically available—as I used to be.” He chuckled, “And besides, the environment towards the end of my partying days with the Club was always so tense when I was sober enough to sense it.”

“In sooth?” Elias tilted his head as though ignorant to what Howard spoke of. It would be… beneficial to hear Howard’s perspective on the noted and dangerously authentic tensions within their Hellfire branch.

“Yes, in sooth, Shakespeare,” Howard scoffed. “I swore sometimes that you two were going to tear Shaw and his friends apart. Isn’t the Inner Circle supposed to get along? And also, what’s up with the Hellfire Club coordinating the Cuban Missile Crisis and trying to spark mutually assured destruction?”

“That was all Shaw’s sect,” Elias withheld a snarl. “Trust us; we had no idea the Black Court was going to do something so gauche and nihilistic behind our backs.”

“Moreover, Howard, don’t be daft,” Emma rolled her glittering snow-colored eyes. “From your time as a director of S.H.I.E.L.D. to your own experiences as creator and chief executive of Stark Industries, you know how it is to work alongside people just as headstrong as yourself. Also, when have you ever known the upper crust to ‘get along’?”

Though his mother was making generalizations to dissuade Howard from probing further into the dynamics of the New England Hellfire Club’s Inner Circle, the man was not inherently wrong in his assessment. There had been a time when the Inner Circle had run like a well-oiled machine (with a little bit of psychic policing as the lubricant, admittedly, though that was beside the point). However, that era of esprit de corps had come to an abrupt and bloody conclusion at the onset of the Second World War when Elias and his mother had been called to Europe to assist the Strategic Scientific Reserve in their mission to combat the forces of HYDRA ravaging the European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern theatres.

While Emma and Elias had been offering their services in whatever manner best helped the S.S.R.’s early war efforts—whether that be telepathically spying on, psychically lobotomizing, and/or brutally assassinating Nazis and fascists—Edward Buckman, the Black King at the time, had been charmed by Sebastian Hiram Shaw’s ambition and ruthlessness between the sporadic home visits Elias and Emma were able to make. Naturally, it was while they were across the pond that Buckman had idiotically decided to mentor Shaw for a leadership position in the Club. Buckman, the heedless oaf, may as well have signed his and his lover’s own death warrants. 

In August of 1943, Shaw, a closeted mutant and the CEO and founder of a weapons manufacturing company slightly less impressive than Stark Industries, had betrayed Buckman. Shaw had the Black King executed alongside his Black Queen and lover Paris Seville at her coastal Rhode Island estate and had the murders pinned on one of Seville’s maids with whom Buckman engaged in highly inappropriate relations on the side. With Buckman and Seville six feet under and Elias’s and Emma’s North American presence growing scarcer the longer the war raged on, Shaw had secured almost complete control over the New England branch of the Hellfire Club. It did not require an overly active imagination to grasp how unfortunate such a situation and the innumerable unseemly alterations to the Club Shaw was able to churn out in Elias’s and Emma’s absence turned out to be for all parties involved, save perhaps Shaw himself and his closest allies. Their time would come, though; in fact, it was coming, burgeoning on the horizon like a radiant dawn. 

“So,” Elias felt the gears turning in Howard’s mind, felt him prepare to again press the issue of the Inner Circle, and cut him off. “How is Maria?”

“Good, good.” Howard accepted the conversational redirection. To a point. “She more or less banned me from ever attending one of your Club parties again.”

“A pity,” Emma remarked without much conviction. Howard, bullheaded as he was, was blatantly not letting talk of the Hellfire Club drop so easily. Emma heaved a prolonged psychic sigh, _“I suppose this is the price we must pay for making an unannounced visit and lying about why we truly came.”_

 _“We might as well let him jabber on,”_ Elias returned. _“It will give you more time to root around in Vanko’s skull and see what kind of intel he had been sending the K.G.B. before he decided to quit and practically ask for them to send Natalia after him.”_

Out of some quasi-Pavlovian reflex Elias occasionally acted upon at the mention of Natalia, he unconsciously glanced to his right arm. Beneath the silk sleeve of his dress shirt, the young woman’s Parisian parting gift remained on the far side of his bicep—a surprisingly clean silver-pink line spanning the muscle, the remnant of a wound bone-deep. He could have healed the scar much in the same manner he had psionically regenerated the damaged tissue and lost blood, but he had decided to keep it on a whim. Elias could not quite explain it, but in the moment and even now, it had felt and still feels wrong somehow to will it away with no more than a bat of his eyes.

It could be a result of his growing… fondness of Natalia. Receiving a live stream of updates on her without cessation through the psychic tag he had anchored deep in her psyche had certainly warmed Elias to a strange partiality from his initially scientific curiosity and pragmatic mindset concerning how the U.S.S.R.’s premier Black Widow might best operate as a pawn for him and his mother’s far-reaching ambitions. Though it was difficult to describe what exactly Elias felt for Natalia after she had unknowingly been a constant fixture in his mind for well over a year, he did hold for her a great deal of sympathy—or maybe empathy since he vicariously felt her suffering? Irrespective of sentiment, due to the bond that Elias had psionically forged with Natalia, he had gained a wealth of superliminal and subliminal knowledge from the young woman and likely knew her and the Red Room just as intimately as she herself did at the current moment.

Formally recognized in the U.S.S.R. as an invitation-only and little-known girl’s boarding school and ballet conservatoire named the Red Room Academy for the Advanced Education of Exceptional Young Women, the Red Room was in reality a remote espionage training facility for vulnerable and easily-acquired orphan girls across the vast U.S.S.R. As for the historical particulars of the facility and the Black Widow Ops Program instituted there, Natalia was not exactly well-versed. With a little digging and conversing with old former S.S.R. associates who had infiltrated the Red Room Academy in 1946, Elias and his mother were able to piece together some of the information beyond Natalia’s grasp. The Red Room itself was the brainchild of Russia’s Department X, a covert deep science and espionage government agency created by Joseph Stalin after the Great War to ensure that the Soviet Union would become the world’s leading superpower by having better weapons than both its enemies and allies combined. Despite founding the Red Room sometime in the 1920s and crafting the Russian Assassin Program—the Black Widow Ops Program’s precursor—to train young girls as elite spies and assassins who would grow up to hopefully be some of the U.S.S.R.’s greatest operatives, Department X produced rather unimpressive results. It was not until the final years of World War II when Department X experienced some form of smashing success—likely the replication or development of a variant of Erskine’s Super Soldier Serum paired with advancements in the field of psychotechnics or the acquisition of psionicially gifted assets—that inspired an overhaul of the previously middling Russian Assassin Program, thus birthing the Black Widow Ops Program which would go on to garner additional victories for the Soviet Union.

What Natalia did know about the Red Room, though, was all in lived experience, which was without a doubt just as crucial as the more historiographical information Elias and Emma had managed to uncover. At any rate, Natalia’s intel was by far more likely to be of immediate practical use. Located among the pine woods and swamps of northwestern Byelorussia, the Red Room was hidden well enough from public sight that evidence of its crimes against humanity could be buried in the winter snow or tossed into the nearby marshy lowlands for the forest’s resident scavengers to consume and thereby conceal. The facility’s inhuman abuses were many, though brainwashing, torture, murder, forced human experimentation, and the training of child soldiers certainly topped the list. 

While Natalia’s childhood had been spent mastering the art of killing and weaponizing her budding femininity and learning the manifold ways to destabilize governments, other girls her age had been able to be carefree and happy in the summer years of childhood. Laughing, singing, playing, things that Natalia had never known, that she may never know. Such youthful innocence should not be a privilege for those able to afford it, and the fact that it indeed was an honor rather than a God-given right on this depraved chunk of rock floating in an unforgiving universe made Elias’s blood boil in his veins and gave him rash notions to astrally project his consciousness halfway across the world and psychically assassinate the monsters responsible for ruining the lives of little girls like Natalia.

“You doing fine over there, Elias?” Howard’s voice cut through the fog of fury that clouded Elias’s mind and brought him rushing back to reality. Howard’s gaze was wary, his hands wrapped carefully around his now empty tumbler.

“Lost in thought, Howard,” Elias forced a laugh and a tight-lipped smile. “Forgive me for my preoccupation.”

“No need for apologies,” Howard said with a much more reassuring smile than Elias’s. He cleared his throat awkwardly, his upturned lips slipping in mild concern. “Is it Rogers and… Barnes?”

“Uh…” Elias blinked, thrown. Emma tensed in Howard’s chair.

“Howard—” Emma warned at the same moment that Howard set his tumbler aside and said, “This month marks the 20th anniversary of Rogers’s flying the _Valkyrie_ into the Arctic and Barnes’s—”

“I may be a centenarian, Stark, but my memory has yet to fail me,” Elias lightly quipped. He swallowed, his throat growing thick with the melancholy that had been intermittently afflicting him for days, though, admittedly had receded since he and his mother had decided to investigate Howard’s secret research facility. “James—” Elias frowned. No one had ever referred to James by his first name other than Elias himself, James’s second-generation immigrant mother Winifred, and his headstrong Romanian grandmother, and that is how the man had liked it. “Buck would have been 48 years old on March 10.”

Emma reached up for Elias’s hand, holding onto it tightly: _“Why don’t we talk about something else, darling? Something like Howard’s laughably short-lived career as a film director or when Peggy knocked him into the Thames on V-E Day for trying to kiss her and how he would have drowned had he not been fished out by a group of frogmen.”_

Elias squeezed his mother’s hand, grateful, but sighed instead, “I have missed him every day since 1945. Steve too; he was a remarkable man and one of the best friends I have ever had.”

“I…” Howard scowled, shaking his head. “I hate this time of the year. Reminds me of all the ways we could have done things differently back then. Reminds me of how the world lost some of the greatest men and left profiteers like me behind.”

“Howard, you are hardly to blame for anything that happened during that odious chapter in the text of human existence.” Emma massaged the bridge of her nose wearily. She always got weary when speaking of the war.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty for helping to produce weapons of mass destruction, Emma, for working on Project Manhattan and making that godforsaken atom bomb,” Howard admitted in a rare moment of incisive and brutal honesty. “You know, my greatest creation was Captain America; he was the only thing I made that genuinely saved lives, directly and indirectly, instead of outright claiming them.”

Elias, in an even rarer moment of empathy, pursed his brow: “Oh, Howard...”

“What do you think this Earth would be like had Barnes not fallen?” Howard asked, his gaze faraway. “Had Rogers found some way to save the day without sacrificing himself in the end?”

“Thinking like that will not bring them back,” Elias pushed himself upright from the back of the chair his mother sat in, feeling the need to put his body in motion to better occupy his mind and the darkness which eddied at its outskirts. “But if you want my God’s honest opinion, I would have dragged Buck home from the war after the Commandos came back from their mission to capture Zola and returned him to his family like he wanted the whole bloody time he was overseas. He would be safe, happy. Likely a mite more rotund and softer in spots, but still as handsome as ever.” Elias exhaled heavily through his nose as he felt his voice begin to falter. He paced across the room, examining the sparsely decorated walls to distract himself. “As for Steve, well, he and Peggy would have gone dancing. Courted. Maybe married and had a few kids as obstinate as both of them.”

Elias turned and saw that his mother’s eyes were on him. They were no longer glowing white with telepathic power. Instead, they were just their regular pretty blue and so profoundly sad. He averted his gaze.

Howard broke the silence: “You really loved Barnes, didn’t you?”

“With every aching fiber of my being.”

* * *

Shutting the passenger’s side door of his mother’s porcelain white Aston Martin DB5, Elias flipped up the wide collar of his Burberry peacoat against the frigid early morning drizzle sailing near-horizontal on the wind. The soft wool brushed the stubble of his jaw, reminding him that he needed to shave. Or maybe not—he could raise a neatly trimmed beard like he had in his twenties and thirties; full facial hair was slowly coming back into fashion since it had silently grown passé in the decades following the Civil War. He adjusted the brim of his beaver-fur fedora as a gust of wind tried to snag it from atop his head. He shoved his leather-gloved hands in his coat pockets, pushing all thoughts of grooming and haircare aside for the time being, and glanced around the lot surrounding Howard’s Queens-based research facility which had officially lost its top-secret status as of Natalia’s visit to it less than twelve hours ago.

Although he had remotely kept tabs on Natalia and her activities from the previous night via the psychic tag embedded in her psyche, Elias had to give his favorite Slavic spider a hand upon observing the physical aftermath of said nighttime activities. She had indubitably left a message. Grey plumes of smoke yet curled up into the cold rainy sky from the half-melted and warped remains of the warehouse where Howard’s security and surveillance station had once been located as well as from the ragged hole which had been blown in the graffiti-laden exterior wall outside the part of the factory where Howard’s laboratories had been. The smell of ash still hung heavy in the air, and a vaguely chemical odor slithered beneath the burnt scent, only detectable when the breeze happened to propel it in the right direction from the assembly line laboratories. Half-singed papers, broken lab equipment, and strips of metal rested upon the cracking concrete like fallen corpses before the plant’s newfound sharp-edged maw while literal blackened corpses littered the hard earth near the burnt warehouse. Picking through all the detritus as they slipped into and tramped out of the hole in the factory wall and the warehouse’s writhen skeleton was a team from Damage Control, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s official cleanup crew that assessed and controlled messes like the one the K.G.B. had left behind for Howard to find.

 _“What happened here?”_ Emma, in a dark trench tied loosely about her waist, a matching bucket hat, and white André Courrèges go-go boots, walked around her British grand tourer after locking it to stand beside her son.

 _“What you see before you is the result of the foolishness of another of the field chaperones the K.G.B. seems so insistent upon pairing Natalia with following the events which transpired in West Berlin and Paris.”_ Elias swept his gaze around the wrecked compound and inspected the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents as they went about their work with antlike efficiency. _“While Natalia cleared the way for her K.G.B. babysitter, a veteran agent named Boris Turgenov, and then permanently took down the surveillance system by setting off high-grade explosives in the warehouse, Turgenov made his way to the labs. Howard was not onsite during the attack, but what PMCs remained from Natalia’s initial strike evacuated the other scientists and got them to safety by the time Turgenov broke through the lab doors—”_

_“And found Vanko still there?”_

_“Precisely,”_ Elias nodded. _“Vanko refused to let Turgenov haul him back to the U.S.S.R. where he would be exterminated, tossed into the Siberian wilderness to fend for himself, or brainwashed into servitude, no doubt.”_

_“And the gaping hole in the factory wall comes in where?”_

_“Vanko and Tergenov scuffled. Vanko pulled out a highly unstable and untested ray gun of some sort that he and Howard had recently designed, fired it, and blew up not only Turgenov but also part of the factory wall and himself.”_

_“So Vanko is dead?”_

The sound of wet concrete chips and glass crunching underfoot filled the silent compound as Elias and Emma impassively watched the Damage Control team clear the area, rolling charred corpses into body bags, sorting through seared and water-damaged classified research notes, and lugging damaged laboratory gear into S.H.I.E.L.D. cargo vans pulled up in the loading bay near where Emma had parked the GT she had fallen in love with after having seen it being driven by Sean Connery as James Bond in _Goldfinger_ last year.

 _“Vanko was admitted into the ICU at Queens Hospital Center when first responders found him pinned under a massive slab of the collapsed wall,”_ Elias said. _“He’s in critical condition and is suffering from… a lot.”_

Taking a moment to parse through the colorful threadlike psionic signatures and layers of psychic imprints left along the bank of Flushing Creek, Elias found a trace of Natalia’s psyche almost immediately. Claret red as the blood she spilled or the hair framing her pale face and redolent of new leather, spring lilacs in full bloom, and scouring soap, it was a thing to which he had become accustomed over the years. He knew it like the back of his hand, and it was because of this that Elias had to suppress a troubled sigh. 

It was changing, displaying telltale signs that Natalia’s Black Widow conditioning was deteriorating and had been doing so in an insidious manner for some time now. As best as Elias could tell, the only perceptible effects of the conditional degradation were still relatively minor: implanted Red Room memories and obedience were grudgingly shifting like once-settled tectonic plates encrusting the slumbering superdense core that was all that the Soviets had attempted to repress within Natalia as it turned fitfully in its dwindling sleep. The vague sense of wrongness that she had experienced intermittently a month after Elias had first planted the anchor had now become something akin to her new understanding of personal normalcy, and the corrective switches wired into her programming which set Tchaikovsky to thundering in her skull whenever her psyche deviated from the preset Soviet standard held for Widows before righting the abnormality were so eroded that they only flipped once every week or two. 

This provided Elias with only an infinitesimal amount of comfort despite the fact that these results were the slow-growing fruit of his psychic anchor and his mother’s further splintering of Natalia’s conditioning in the middle of Paris’s leading military museum as he had kept the Black Widow preoccupied with his testing of her potential as an asset to be added to the Frost’s arsenal. Verily, the Frosts had wanted this to happen, had caused this to happen, and yet… Elias could not shake the niggling concern that wormed in the pit of his stomach at the thought of how his and his mother’s manipulations might impact Natalia should the K.G.B.’s psy-ops agents or her brutal handlers finally discover that the U.S.S.R.’s best Widow was compromised in perhaps the most compromising of ways. It was a reality that would precipitately come about if Natalia’s conditioning continued to flag at the rate at which it had been and the Frosts did nothing to either stop it or further secrete it. Given the circumstances, though, secreting it was going to prove to be an increasingly difficult option that would call for a drastic decision should Elias and his mother wish to circumvent future resource-draining complications. 

Emma reached out and touched her son’s arm, shaking him from his thoughts: _“Where is she now?”_

 _“Preparing to land in Moscow from a nine hour flight aboard a small Soviet jet,”_ Elias honed in on his psychic connection to Natalia, and he saw her piloting the private aircraft through the heavy steely clouds of the Russian countryside. _“When she lands, she will refuel and rest for a few hours before returning to the K.G.B. outpost in Novosibirsk where the Widows are all stationed.”_

 _“We’re not letting the K.G.B. realize what kind of state Natalia’s conditioning is in and losing nearly two years of work and a potential asset,”_ Emma reassuringly squeezed Elias’s arm through his thick peacoat with her gloved hand as the concealed front entrance of Howard’s facility opened and Howard himself stepped out into the gloomy morning weather. _“What would you like to do?”_

 _“Go over the specifics later,”_ Elias said as Howard’s eyes turned to the Frosts, his countenance inscrutable. He was in his shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled up to his elbows, and his tie was thrown about his neck more like a lariat than a necktie. _“Summarily, to remove the Soviet psychics from the chessboard; they’re nothing but a nuisance at this point and present little reason to keep around any longer.”_

Innocuous as it may seem when thusly phrased, that was the drastic decision: ridding the playing field and the K.G.B. of its psionically gifted agents. With them out of the picture, the risk of Natalia’s psychic developments and waning mental programming being discovered would be diminished by a factor of fifty. Bloody hell, maybe a hundred. However, what it really meant was the lobotomy or extermination of each and every agent under employ by the Soviet government who was in possession of a telepathic or empathic talent. To think that lobotomy would be the more merciful of the two practices was the misconception of a fool, though; the K.G.B. would kill the lobotomized psychics the instant the agency had no use for them.

As Howard approached Elias and Emma with a stack of crinkled schematics in his hands, Elias felt his mother give him an assenting telepathic nod. She understood quite well what he had meant. Neither of them were exactly strangers to dirtying their hands when the situation called for such direct action to be taken to protect their interests. Truthfully, they had dirtied their hands for much less. To do what Elias had in mind was not a delight nor would it be taken lightly, but it was going to occur regardless.

“You came,” Howard said as he paused before them. 

“You called,” Emma replied. “Before I would typically even commence my morning toilette.”

“My apologies, Ems.”

Elias and Emma frowned in unison: “I beg your pardon?”

“Can we walk and talk?” Howard checked as he squinted up at the dreary sky, his upturned face collecting raindrops. Before either Emma or Elias could give their affirmation, Howard was on the move, brushing by them to hop into the back of a nearby black S.H.I.E.L.D. van. Emma and Elias shared a look before trailing after Howard, coming to stand outside the cargo van as his voice echoed out to them: “Were either of you responsible for exploding my warehouse, blasting my labs to bits, or hospitalizing my lead researcher by dealing him life-threatening injuries?”

“Howard,” Elias responded with equal parts cautionary deliberateness and affected woundedness. “You think so lowly of us.”

“Not at all,” came the man’s muffled reply and the sound of papers being shuffled from within the van. “I’ve always admired the both of you for your self-serving and scheming natures, really.” Elias blinked, uncertain how to interpret that comment, while Emma stared impassively at the vehicle. “I just want to know if this is some sort of corporate rivalry thing spurred by the sight of what my team was working on three days ago when you two stopped by for a visit.”

“As much as we would love to live up to your oh-so flattering expectations of us, Howard,” Emma rested her hands upon her hips as her stare crystallized into incisive ice, “it is with great regret that we must inform you that we are not the bombardiers for which you are looking.”

Howard was silent for a long moment, the only sound escaping the nondescript cargo van being that of the man’s sorting through salvaged materials and paperwork. The upturned collar of Elias’s coat tickled his cheek as a strong burst of wind whipped across the lot, carrying with it a storm of ashes. The knotted belt of his mother’s trench slipped loose and the long panels of fabric billowed around her in a most dramatic fashion, revealing the pleated white velvet mini dress she wore underneath. Arms still akimbo, Emma made no move to reclose her long coat.

Finally, footfalls. Howard stepped out of the back of the van and down to the concrete lot to eye the Frosts critically. Elias’s left eyebrow arced high on his forehead of its own volition, questioning and challenging and drolly entertained all at once.

“So,” Howard nodded tightly before crossing his arms over his chest, “the miscellaneous charred body parts scattered about Vanko’s lab don’t belong to an agent you hired to infiltrate my factory?”

“No, Howard,” Emma said coolly. “They do not.”

Silence. Rivulets of cold water trickled down Howard’s face. His pressed white button-up clung to his slender frame, dangerously close to being translucent if not transparent in some places.

Elias cleared his throat: “The man’s name was Boris Turgenov.”

“What?” Howard’s bushy eyebrows furrowed.

“The owner of the miscellaneous charred body parts,” Elias said. “His name was Boris Turgenov, a veteran agent of the K.G.B.”

“He was on a mission to procure his former Comrade— _id est_ your ex-Soviet friend Dr. Anton Vanko,” Emma added. “Turgenov was to drag Vanko back to _Rodina_ for cognitive recalibration.”

“How did you—?”

“We read the psychic imprints Turgenov left on this place in the short time he was here,” Elias explained, slipping a gloved hand out of his pocket to gesture to what Howard would perceive to be empty air. Of course, it was far from vacant; vibrant wisps of psionic energy drifted about, threadlike psychic signatures unspooled in the rain, and thoughts lapped like waves out from the ocean-deep or puddle-shallow minds of every sentient being surrounding them from Howard to the ant scurrying by his polished leather shoes. Sensing Howard’s confusion, Elias elaborated, “Yes, Turgenov may be dead, but he was not always. If you would like to cut straight to the pith, anything with a neuron produces psionic energy and leaves a nearly permanent residual trace of that energy wherever it goes. It is but a matter of tuning in to the proper frequency, I suppose, to be able to interact with it.”

“Huh,” Howard scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I always thought psychic mumbo-jumbo was more… well, mumbo-jumbo.”

“Yes, well, you would be wrong,” Emma said with a tap of her foot that suggested she was growing tired of the conversation. “Can we help you, Howard, or did you request our presence just to accuse us of arson and murder face-to-face?”

“That was actually about it,” Howard shrugged. “I appreciate the K.G.B. lead you two gave me, though.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked between the two blonds before him before asking, “While you’re both here, can I pick your brains?”

“It is much more likely for us to pick your brain, Howard,” Elias’s lips curled into a small smirk. “Ask whatever you would like.”

“Why do you two think the K.G.B. wants Vanko?”

“Why would they not?” Emma responded flatly. “Not only is he an expert in his scientific fields of study, but he has also worked alongside the famous Howard Stark, one of America’s brightest technological luminaries.”

“That must have tasted bitter on your tongue, Emma,” Howard chuckled without much enthusiasm. 

“I did say ‘one of,’ my dear,” Emma flashed a feline grin.

Howard hummed in response, his forehead creased from the ponderous weight of his ponderings: “There’s not a snowflake’s chance in Hell that a single K.G.B. agent, no matter how much action he’s seen, could pull this op off. No human could have.”

Elias’s jaw clenched almost imperceptibly. Emma tilted her head slightly, her long hair spilling over her shoulder.

“Turgenov must have been some kind of metahuman,” Howard theorized. “A mutant or enhanced individual.”

“He got himself blown up, Howard,” Elias laughed dismissively. “He must not have been _that_ good.”

“Fair enough,” Howard conceded. “I just thought… I don’t know. The Soviets have a history of metahumans.”

“I think that you mean they oppress and systematically murder mutants who fail to offer themselves up as tools and weapons to the government,” Emma said pointedly. “If that is indeed the Soviet history you are referencing.”

“That,” Howard nodded, “and Soviet attempts to make the perfect espionage agents and assassins. Black Widows, they call them now, but I thought they were an exclusively female force.”

“Your dream, I imagine,” Elias jabbed good-naturedly to keep Howard talking. As one of the three co-directors of S.H.I.E.L.D., it was possible that Howard may know something about the Widows that the Frosts had not yet picked up from the anchor in Natalia’s psyche.

“At one time, yes,” Howard snorted, shaking his head. “Now, not so much.” He paused, eying the Frosts briefly. “I admittedly don’t know much about these Widows. Intelligence gathering, spycraft, and espionage is more of Peggy’s area, but I do know that they’re out there and that they’ve got some kind of alternative Super Soldier Serum coursing through their veins.”

“Has S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to capture one of these Widows?” Emma asked. “Studied them to see how the U.S.S.R. miraculously created a strain of Erskine’s serum?”

“Unfortunately, no.” Howard’s shoulders fell as he sighed. “Widows are slippery and typically too dangerous for most of our agents to even attempt to tackle head-on, but Peggy and the Howling Commandos—” He paused, looking quickly between Emma and Elias before amending himself, “Dum Dum’s post-war Howling Commandos, that is, encountered a Black Widow in training back in 1946 in some Byelorussian boarding school-military base-mad scientist’s lair called the _Krasnaya Komnata_ —”

“The Red Room,” Emma said under her breath. 

“You know of it?” Howard was not surprised.

“Only in hushed whispers,” Elias lied. “We never knew what or where it was.”

“They apparently indoctrinate and desensitize girls from an early age to train them to be elite operatives,” Howard accepted Elias’s dishonesty and spoke on. “Peggy and the Howlies saw some disturbing stuff there despite it appearing to be abandoned. They found a girl, nine or so, supposedly left behind in the Soviets’ rush to save their skins from being discovered. Looked real sweet with her pigtails and alligator tears until she stabbed Dum Dum, snatched his revolver, and shot and killed one of the Commandos recruited after the war before she clambered into the ventilation ducts and got away. She popped out of the vents later in the mission, killed an S.S.R. agent, shot one of the other new Commandos in the leg, and still disappeared in the end.”

“Bloody hell,” Elias muttered in disbelief. Dum Dum had not exactly elaborated upon that information when the Frosts had inquired about the 1946 Red Room raid he had co-led with Peggy.

Elias wondered if the girl the S.S.R. and the Commandos had encountered could have been Natalia. No, the ages were wrong; Natalia would have only been four at the time of the S.S.R.’s storming of the Red Room. That fact, however, did not divorce the image of a young Natalia with her red hair twisted into pigtails hacking apart and shooting men over thrice her size and age from the mental picture of another orphaned Russian girl met during the S.S.R.’s 1946 Soviet raid doing just the same.

“Peggy and I ran into a proto-Widow on numerous occasions back in the late-40s who was trained in the Red Room before they developed their variant of the serum,” Howard confessed. “She was in her early twenties and absolutely stunning. Also extremely lethal. I can hardly imagine what she would have been capable of had she been hopped up on some knock-off Erskine biochemical treatments.”

“Anything,” Emma wrapped her coat about herself and knotted the dangling belt about her waist before looking over to her son. “She would have been capable of anything.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Comments, critiques, and feedback are always welcome, and please kudos if you enjoyed the story so others can find it! 
> 
> If you are at all interested in the hypothetical science behind the Stark Industries Arc Reactor prototype described in this chapter, I drew information from a fascinating article by Ryan Carlyle, BSChE, posted on Gizmodo, HuffPost, and Quora which I will link should you wish to read more: https://gizmodo.com/how-iron-mans-arc-reactor-probably-works-1661613682.


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